This is the definitive volume on the development of the English progressive from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, as Kranich approaches the construction from multiple points-of-view, both linguistic and functional. All this is carried out with solid corpus-based methodology in the framework of grammaticalisation theory. While there are several earlier corpus-based studies covering much of the timespan studied here, this is, as the author points out, the first detailed description of the process. Previous studies have focused on specific, shorter time periods, genres or constructions, while here the aim is to arrive at an overview of the entire development.

Following a concise introduction, chapter 2 delves into the theoretical background and methodology. It starts with a brief but satisfactory definition of the basic concepts of grammaticalisation as adopted in this volume and is continued with a description of the corpus methodology applied. It may be pointed out that the corpus chosen for this study, ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), has been used to investigate the progressive before, but Kranich makes a good case for its use in her study. Not only is ARCHER the only stratified multi-genre corpus covering the entire timespan of the rise of the progressive, but the earlier studies using ARCHER (Hundt Reference Hundt, Lindquist and Mair2004a, Reference Hundtb; Núñez Pertejo Reference Núñez Pertejo, Pérez-Guerra, González-Álvarez, Bueno-Alonso and Rama-Martínez2007) have focused on narrower topics than the entire progressive and been carried out on an earlier, somewhat smaller version of the corpus. The decision to limit this study to the British English part of the corpus can be questioned, but, since the coverage of American English in ARCHER was (and is) still more temporally limited than that of British English, it is justifiable to leave possible variation between the varieties outside this study. Kranich shows her thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of her material all through the volume in discussion of results: in some cases the corpus is simply too small for any conclusions. The section on the retrieval of progressive instances from the corpus could function as a how-to-do-it manual for beginning corpus researchers: the process of corpus searches, the methods for dealing with ambiguous cases and the decisions of what or what not to include and why are explained clearly and concisely; in fact, the study could be easily replicated following these instructions. In the case of such a slippery customer as the progressive, clear definitions of what the author includes in and excludes from the study are essential.

One perennial problem of studying the progressive (besides the question of what to call the construction) is the thorny question of aspect and situation type (also known as Aktionsart), and how these should be taken into account when analysing the usage of be + -ing. Kranich provides a clear discussion of the issues, and approaches them not just from the perspective of English, but from a general linguistic view of imperfective and progressive markers. As she points out (p. 44): ‘Naturally occurring examples will give us a better idea about the interaction between progressive aspect and accomplishment situation type than the constructed (often very artificial) example sentences’ that are commonly used to tease out differences in the usage of the progressive. Particularly in a study which covers such a long diachrony of a gradually grammaticalising construction with ‘layering of older and newer meanings’ (p. 75), it is important not to rely too strongly on descriptions of Present-day English usage, even if one of the interests is to find out how the current state of affairs came about, and what the history of the progressive can tell us about the peculiarities of the present. In fact, while chapter 3 of the volume is dedicated to a discussion of the functions of the progressive in Present-day English, the author never loses sight of the bigger picture of diachronic development and processes of grammaticalisation. The author's thorough familiarity with earlier research also allows her to pose clear research questions (p. 49) and hypotheses (pp. 51, 71) that are later followed up in the volume. Here a few words of commendation are in order on the fact that research written in languages besides English (although German is, of course, a given in this case) has been included in the study. Relevant works written in German, French, Spanish and Italian are cited, and careful translations of quoted passages are provided.

Chapter 4 discusses the early history of the progressive, that is, the time preceding the focus of this volume. This is, rightly, one of the shorter chapters in the volume. All the various suggested sources for the construction are evaluated, and a description of usage in Old and Middle English from multiple points of view is provided. Particularly the functions of the progressive are discussed extensively, and relevantly for the study at hand. Later chapters frequently refer back to what is presented in these discussions (and in all the preliminary chapters), and evaluate earlier research in the light of the findings of this volume. Equally brief is chapter 5, which gives frequentative information on the use of the progressive in the ARCHER corpus and compares this to other corpus-based studies. The genre distribution is discussed here, as well, and evidence of earlier studies in different genres is evaluated based on the current findings. There is also some discussion of sociolinguistic aspects, although, as Kranich rightly points out, ARCHER is not suited for sociolinguistic research as such.

The meat of the work follows in chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 discusses the various contexts of the Modern English progressive, as suggested by earlier research (the loss of double -ing, the emergence of the passive progressive, variation across the verbal paradigm, clause types, adverbial modification, subject types, situation types, the progressive of full verbs be and have and the contexts of the type to be a-hunting). Some of the rarer contexts (double -ing forms like being coming) are discussed first, and the discussion is supplemented by examples from Present-day English obtained through internet searches. It is not explained why the choice to use the internet was made, but presumably such rare cases would not appear in suitable numbers even in the largest corpora. Context by context, hypotheses and interpretations suggested by earlier scholars are tested and evaluated in Kranich's data. This is corpus linguistics at its best. One of my few quibbles is that the results of statistical testing (chi-squared; both here and in the following chapter) are only mentioned as either non-random or not: providing the p-values would not have taken significant space, and would have given the reader some additional information to evaluate the tables.

At times, admittedly, the data run rather thin, and when there are only a few examples it might be prudent to ask what the influence of the stylistic preferences of individual authors may be. The question of clause types, for example, is mainly focused on the differences between main and subordinate clauses due to scarcity of data, while the interesting patterns, according to earlier studies (e.g. Strang Reference Strang and Anderson1982), are to be found in specific types of subordinate clauses. Again, Kranich is admirably clear on the limitations of the corpus and the requirement for further studies in this respect. Similarly, there seems to be more room for studies of genre variation, particularly in scientific writing in general and medical writing in particular, and the patterning of usage in main and subordinate clauses. As a refreshing departure from the approach of earlier studies to adverbial modification, Kranich has specifically focused on temporal adverbials, and categorised them in accordance with her conclusions of aspectual use, temporal anchoring and situation type as discussed in chapter 3. This again is an interesting line of enquiry that could be further studied with a larger corpus, particularly the use of always with objective and subjective progressive. Likewise, focusing her analysis of subject type differently from Hundt (Reference Hundt2004b), with a more limited definition of agentivity, the author finds results which suggest an increase of agentive and animate subjects in twentieth-century English. With the truly rare cases, such as the to be a-hunting construction (discussed in both chapters 6 and 7), which only appears ten times in the entire corpus, it is questionable whether it is worthwhile devoting any space to it. On the other hand, providing future scholars with the available evidence, however scarce, is valuable, and gives pointers to avenues worth pursuing (or not, as the case may be). This is also in line with the completist tendency of the author, as she seems determined to squeeze out every last drop of information available from the corpus.

Chapter 7 traces the functions of the progressive, based on the discussion of functions in chapter 3. The main focus is on the progressive as a marker of aspect, on situation type and on expression of speaker attitude and emotion. In addition, there is a diachronic overview, and a discussion of genre variation of the functions. Unlike many previous scholars (e.g. Smitterberg Reference Smitterberg2005), Kranich takes the view that each instance of the progressive only has one function. This leads to her results not being fully comparable with the frequencies attested in other data sets, but also to increased clarity with regard to the description of each function. On the whole, the author does a good job of dealing with the various shades of meaning the progressive has, giving reasons for each analytical step and sufficient descriptions for others who might want to replicate these categories. The use of plentiful examples is also very helpful here, as they represent a wide variety of uses and give a more varied picture of each subtype identified. Again, the strengths of a thorough corpus-based study are visible, as, for example, the commonly discussed examples of the ‘imperfective paradox’ (the She was drawing a circle, but then she drew a square type, i.e. cases where there is a concrete product) turn out to be the rarest of the category. Many suggestions from earlier authors are tested here again, and the hypotheses, analyses and findings are presented in constant dialogue with earlier research. The size of the corpus and the rarity of the construction pose problems, particularly with the rarer functions and the smaller subcategories, and especially for the seventeenth and occasionally also the eighteenth century. The possible influence of individual writers (or texts) is also touched upon (p. 231) as one possible influencing factor when discussing the genre variation of the functions of the progressive. Ljung (Reference Ljung1980) provides many fruitful starting points, and several of his interpretations find confirmation in this volume, while many others are cast in doubt.

The penultimate chapter evaluates the evidence presented in previous chapters in the light of grammaticalisation and subjectification. Throughout the volume, Kranich never loses sight of the grammaticalisation process, and comments on assorted details of analysis from this point of view. This brief chapter brings together the various threads of analysis to a final evaluation of the development. Kranich argues, convincingly, that while the grammaticalisation of the progressive began in the eighteenth century, it was only in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that obligatorification of the construction with aspectual meanings took place. She further points out that the progressive does not show great frequency in particular linguistic environments (combined with modals, with full verbs be and have etc.) to which it spread late, but this has more to do with the semantic qualities of the construction than lacking grammaticalisation. The author also discusses the problems of variation among genres, and notes that the semantics of the construction is equally responsible for the uneven distribution in evidence there: all genres do not have equal need of the progressive, and therefore its distribution pattern cannot be expected to be even in this respect, and should not be regarded as evidence of the stage of its grammaticalisation. As to the process of subjectification, Kranich sees two separate processes during the time period studied here. The first one is de-subjectification, as the aspectual meaning of the progressive starts its grammaticalisation, and the second one, following later, is a spread of the new interpretative function, building on the aspectual function.

The final chapter presents the conclusions, not only with regard to the development of the progressive, but also concerning methodology and the theoretical framework applied. The main findings of the volume are summarised clearly and succinctly. There are also suggestions for further research, and particularly the need to study the progressive in other historical corpora is brought up. This is especially true of the earlier periods up to and including the eighteenth century, since the paucity of data due to low frequencies leaves too much room for conjecture. All in all, this well-edited and well-structured volume, written in an entirely academic yet pleasingly readable style, brings much new light on the history of the progressive. It also suggests many new paths of enquiry for future scholars. Only a study with a much larger corpus, or one with linguistic annotation, would allow for more insight into the grammaticalisation process of the progressive.